What I’ve been most focused on, listening-wise, this past week:
(1) White Noise, Yoga Heat: The CD showed up in the mail late last year, and on first appearance it seemed like a prank: a collection of four lengthy, meditative drones attributed to Lou Reed, of the Velvet Underground, and released on a small record label. […]
There’s a website called vozme.com that takes any typed text and transforms it, almost instantly, into a download-able MP3. The site currently works in English, Italian and Spanish. The following link is a recording of this post: MP3. Why it has a slight Irish accent — “reh-KORD-eng” — I don’t know.
The latest release on the netlabel called term, a subsidiary of Taylor Deupree’s 12k label, is a live performance recorded back in November of last year, featuring three eminent electronicists: Sawako (computer and voice), Richard Chartier (computer), and Shinjiro Yamaguchi (mixing board, feedback loops, sampling). The concert was part of the festival Atlantic Waves, held […]
The discussion about whether rap counts as poetry is still ongoing (count me among the affirmative), but how about human beatboxing? That’s the performance practice in which the voice emulates the instrumentals of hip-hop, instrumentals usually performed on technology, such as turntables and drum machines. Beatboxing is a nimble onomatopoeia that yields music.
The writing.upenn.edu/pennsound website, […]
To close the week out, a recently uploaded interview with softspoken minimalist composer Terry Riley, dating from 1969. The interview is by Charles Amirkhanian, founder of Other Minds, the catalog of which (at archive.org) houses the file. Also interviewed are Robert Ashley and William Maraldo, then co-directors of the Mills Center for Contemporary Music in […]
This is what I’ve been most focused on, listening-wise, this past week:
(1) If it’s possible to imagine a merging of Charles Mingus’s muddy, deeply felt jazz and Morton Feldman’s proto-ambient classical arrangements, this may be it: The track “Itsuki no Komoriuta” off the Fujin Raijin album by the Sakoto Fujii Min-Yoh Ensemble (Les Disques Victo, […]
One man’s hard-drive-cleaning is another’s hard-drive-filling. Well, maybe not “filling,” but a solid 3.16 megabytes that might never had been heard widely had Leafcutter John (born John Burton) not decided to clean out his computer in advance of recording a new album. From the digital back pages came a three-and-half-minute track that starks in static […]
The Amsterdam-based DNK website’s audio section, dnk-amsterdam.com, has uploaded a live recording by Vesna Pisarovic (voice) and Roberto Garréton (electronics) from May 2007. Pisarovic has a gentle sound, at least to the extent that it’s legible as a voice in this recording. For the most of the piece, Garréton’s electronics send the voice through an […]
Cut to the chase, the clock’s ticking on 2007 as I type this. That previous sentence is intended to provide an alibi: making note of the circumstances under which a “best of” list is produced gives me an out down the road, when I might change my mind. In any case, this year’s “best of” […]
Looking for something seasonal yet electronically mediated to fill your holiday playlist? Sort of like a yule log, but musical? Try the new compilation, A Candle’s Golden Glow, from the Dark Winter netlabel (darkwinter.com). Its 15 tracks are ambient, droning,
and entirely season-appropriate. Much of it would fit in well with Phil Kline’s Unsilent Night, the […]